Ruth Rendell

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Biography

Crime novelist Ruth Rendell was born on 17 February 1930 in London, and educated at Loughton County High School, Essex. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has received many awards for her work, including the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger (lifetime achievement award), and the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence.

She is the author of a series of many novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Wexford, set in Kingsmarkham, a fictional English town. The first of these, From Doon with Death, is also her first novel and was published in 1964. Books in the series include Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (1992), Simisola (1994), Road Rage (1997), End in Tears (2005), and Not in the Flesh (2007). She also writes novels under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. These books include A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986), A Fatal Inversion (1987), winner of the Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction, Gallowglass (1990), King Solomon's Carpet (1991), Asta's Book (1993) and The Brimstone Wedding (1995). The Blood Doctor (2002) is a psychological novel based on the diaries of Lord Henry of Nanther, Queen Victoria's physician.

Her two books of collected short stories were published in 1987 and 2008. Many of her novels and short stories have been successfully adapted for television.

Ruth Rendell was awarded a CBE in 1996. A Life Peerage was conferred on her in 1997 as Baroness Rendell of Babergh.  Her latest novel is Portobello (2008).

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Crime, Fiction, Short stories

Bibliography

From Doon with Death   Long, 1964

To Fear a Painted Devil   Long, 1965

Vanity Dies Hard   Long, 1966

A New Lease of Death   Long, 1967

Wolf to the Slaughter   Long, 1967

The Secret House of Death   Long, 1968

The Best Man to Die   Long, 1969

A Guilty Thing Surprised   Hutchinson, 1970

No More Dying Then   Hutchinson, 1971

One Across, Two Down   Hutchinson, 1971

Murder Being Once Done   Hutchinson, 1972

Some Lie and Some Die   Hutchinson, 1973

The Face of Trespass   Hutchinson, 1974

Shake Hands Forever   Hutchinson, 1975

A Demon in My View   Hutchinson, 1976

The Fallen Curtain and Other Stories   Hutchinson, 1976

A Judgement in Stone   Hutchinson, 1977

A Sleeping Life   Hutchinson, 1978

Make Death Love Me   Hutchinson, 1979

Means of Evil and Other Stories   Hutchinson, 1979

The Lake of Darkness   Hutchinson, 1980

Put On By Cunning   Hutchinson, 1981

Master of the Moor   Hutchinson, 1982

The Fever Tree and Other Stories   Hutchinson, 1982

The Speaker of Mandarin   Hutchinson, 1983

The Killing Doll   Hutchinson, 1984

The Tree of Hands   Hutchinson, 1984

An Unkindness of Ravens   Hutchinson, 1985

The New Girlfriend and Other Stories   Hutchinson, 1985

A Dark-Adapted Eye   (as Barbara Vine)   Viking, 1986

Live Flesh   Hutchinson, 1986

A Fatal Inversion   (as Barbara Vine)   Viking, 1987

A Warning to the Curious/The Ghost Stories of M. R. James   (editor)   Hutchinson, 1987

Collected Short Stories   Hutchinson, 1987

Heartstones   Hutchinson, 1987

Talking to Strange Men   Hutchinson, 1987

The House of Stairs   (as Barbara Vine)   Viking, 1988

The Veiled One   Hutchinson, 1988

Ruth Rendell's Suffolk   Muller, 1989

The Bridesmaid   Hutchinson, 1989

Undermining the Central Line   (with Colin Ward)   Chatto & Windus, 1989

Gallowglass   (as Barbara Vine)   Viking, 1990

Going Wrong   Hutchinson, 1990

King Solomon's Carpet   (as Barbara Vine)   Viking, 1991

The Copper Peacock and Other Stories   Hutchinson, 1991

Kissing the Gunner's Daughter   Hutchinson, 1992

Asta's Book   (as Barbara Vine)   Viking, 1993

The Crocodile Bird   Hutchinson, 1993

No Night is Too Long   (as Barbara Vine)   Viking, 1994

Simisola   Hutchinson, 1994

Blood Lines: Long and Short Stories   Hutchinson, 1995

In the Time of His Prosperity   (as Barbara Vine)   Penguin, 1995

The Brimstone Wedding   (as Barbara Vine)   Viking, 1995

The Reason Why   (editor)   Cape, 1995

The Keys to the Street   Hutchinson, 1996

Road Rage   Hutchinson, 1997

A Sight for Sore Eyes   Hutchinson, 1998

The Chimney Sweeper's Boy   (as Barbara Vine)   Viking, 1998

Harm Done   Hutchinson, 1999

Grasshopper   (as Barbara Vine)   Viking, 2000

Piranha to Scurfy and Other Stories   Hutchinson, 2000

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me   Hutchinson, 2001

The Babes in the Wood   Hutchinson, 2002

The Blood Doctor   (as Barbara Vine)   Viking, 2002

The Rottweiler   Hutchinson, 2003

13 Steps Down   Hutchinson, 2004

End in Tears   Hutchinson, 2005

The Minotaur   (as Barbara Vine)   Penguin, 2005

The Thief   Arrow, 2006

The Water's Lovely   Hutchinson, 2006

Not In The Flesh   Hutchinson, 2007

Collected Stories 2   Hutchinson, 2008

Portobello   Hutchinson, 2008

The Birthday Present   (as Barbara Vine)   Penguin, 2008

Read about books by Ruth Rendell at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Ruth Rendell at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1976   Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction   A Demon in my View

1981   Arts Council National Book Award for Genre Fiction   Lake of Darkness

1984   Crime Writers' Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction   The Tree of Hands

1986   Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction   Live Flesh

1987   Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction   (as Barbara Vine)   A Fatal Inversion

1987   Edgar Award   (Mystery Writers of America)   A Dark-Adapted Eye

1990   Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence

1991   Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger   (lifetime achievement award)

1991   Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction   (as Barbara Vine)   King Solomon's Carpet

1996   CBE

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Critical Perspective

Ruth Rendell has repeatedly stated her dislike for violence and torture in books: 'I hate torture with a fierce hatred. My favourite charity is the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. I wouldn’t have it in any of my books and reading about it makes me terribly angry. There’s a lot of torture in modern American books and I won’t read any of that.' She has also written that she cannot imagine what it may feel like to kill someone: 'But I imagine that afterwards you would feel so terrible that there would be no release for you. I don’t know what you'd do because even if you confessed it, you’d still have killed a person.'  These statements may come as a surprise from a writer who has made the main focus of her books the investigations in the psychology of deviant individuals placed at the margins of society. Yet, it may be for this attitude that, as fellow novelist Patrick Gale writes, 'Rendell writes about people as coolly as a behaviourist observing the effects of fear or pain on laboratory rats.'

Rendell’s production can be divided into three genres. Her first novel From Doon with Death (1964) introduces the character of Inspector Wexford and the fictional Southern town of Kingsmarkham which represents a microcosm of society. Her second book, To Fear a Painted Devil (1965), is the first of her crime thrillers which do not contain the reassuring presence of Wexford. Rendell alternated these two series until 1986, when, under the name of Barbara Vine, she published her first psychological novel, A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986).

Unlike P. D. James, the other Queen of British crime who sits at the opposite end of the political spectrum, Rendell is a convinced Labour supporter and still defines her political views as 'socialist'. Rendell’s progressive political views are reflected in her novels, which try to innovate a fundamentally conservative literary genre. Ruth Rendell writes mysteries in the vein of a social critic who observes and exposes social inequalities, racial and sexual discriminations and gender biases. It is often argued that mysteries use the character of the detective as an avenging angel who hunts down criminals and assures them to justice in spite of their best efforts to escape punishment. The detective is thus instrumental to the restoration of order in a society momentarily upset by the chaos brought about by crime. The social order is eventually preserved and safeguarded. Rendell’s fiction reacts against the Romantic excess of the genre. Inspector Wexford, whose liberalism is confronted with the conservatism of his deputy, Mike Burden, does assure that criminals receive justice. Yet, Rendell insists on realism and strives to characterise her detective as an ordinary person: 'He’s not a glamour figure. I get fed up with the turbulent sex lives of other people’s policemen.' In addition, the truth that Wexford’s investigations bring to light indicts traditional and conservative beliefs as responsible for the crimes that have been perpetrated. Murders and transgressions of laws are always linked in Rendell’s books to social injustice. The portrait of 'middle England' emerging from her novel is one where traditional values connive with class differences, racism and sexism to stimulate, rather than to keep in check, the irrational desires that will lead people to kill. Wexford investigates contemporary social issues, his enquiries not simply general searches for a metaphysical truth, but always rooted in current debates such as feminism, racism, environmental preservation, labour exploitation, domestic violence and paedophilia. Unlike more traditional inspectors, Wexford is by no mean infallible and is sometimes hostage to the same social conventions, which he exposes as harmfully wrong. For example, in Harm Done (1999), Wexford himself is sceptic about the possibility that domestic violence may occur in a respectable, middle-class milieu.
 
The exploration of the darker impulses engendered by society’s established codes is even more evident in Rendell’s mystery thrillers which do not feature Wexford. Without the institutional presence of the detective, Rendell herself becomes the investigator and she unveils the connections between crime and social and economic disadvantage. These novels, therefore, do not rely so much on the suspense for the identification of the criminal as a constitutive element. On the contrary, they often give away the name of the murderers and of their victims from a very early stage, taking what prompted them to act as their main focus. Tellingly, the first sentence of A Judgement in Stone (1977), filmed in 1995 by another great observer of middle-class hypocrisy, the French director Claude Chabrol, reads: 'Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read and write.' Social exclusion and the indifference of the bourgeoisie, for those who live on the margins of society, are the origins of crimes.

The novels signed as Barbara Vine (Barbara is Rendell’s middle name and Vine is a great-grandmother's maiden name) merge psychological insights with thriller conventions, often starting from the theme of family disease and the perpetuation of deviancy through different generations. Rendell sees the Vine novels as completely different from her other books: 'I don’t think the Barbara Vines are mysteries in any sense. They are different ... The Barbara Vine is much more slowly paced. It is a much more in-depth, searching sort of book; it doesn’t necessarily have a murder in it. It’s almost always set partly in the past, sometimes quite a long way in the past.'  The Vine novels problematise the ability of society to judge the guilt of criminals and to establish truth about human motives to commit crime. Conventional social assumptions (such as the certainty of motherhood) and institutions (such as the House of Lords) are also challenged in the Vine novels, which often have a more marked urban setting.

Whether written as Rendell or Vine, her books have made more tenuous the line dividing popular and serious literature. Some critics, including Joan Smith, have denounced that it is sexism which still belittles her as a popular writer: 'It’s astounding that she hasn’t won the Booker. She has developed into a very good novelist, not just a crime novelist. It’s pure sexism - everyone knows that women can write detective fiction, so they’re allowed to succeed at it. Ian McEwan would never be pigeonholed in this way, even though you could say that he’s written detective novels too.'  Whether one agrees or not with Smith’s feminist critique of the literary establishment, Rendell is surely a literary innovator whose plots remind us of social realities which we too often try hard to forget. Her books are set in a fundamentally amoral world (which is how Rendell describes our contemporary society) and her endings take an unexpectedly more open turn than we would expect from mystery stories: the crime may be solved, but no salvation or redemption occurs, and the tensions which generated it in the first place are left unanswered.

Luca Prono, 2005

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Hutchinson Books Ltd Random House UK Ltd 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London  SW1V 2SA England Tel: +44 (0)20 7840 8400 Fax: +44 (0)20 7932 0761 http://www.randomhouse.co.uk

Agent United Agents 12-26 Lexington Street London  W1F 0LE England Tel: +44 (0)20 3214 0800 Fax: +44 (0)20 3214 0801 E-mail: info@unitedagents.co.uk http://www.unitedagents.co.uk

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